The morning breeze hit my face and I inhaled, deep, filtering the scent profile of the lot. Exhaust, wet gravel, coffee grounds from the dumpster, pine from the tree line.
Underneath all of it, a trace of ozone and metal that didn’t belong.
I moved around the side of the building. The alley between the diner and the hardware store next door was shadowed, barely wide enough for two people. My boots were silent on the gravel as I reached the corner and stopped.
The prickling intensified.
My eyes adjusted to the shadows. The alley stretched another thirty feet before connecting to the street behind the shops. Dumpster to my left, stack of wooden pallets to my right. A drainage grate at the far end.
And on the ground, six inches from the base of the diner’s exterior wall, exactly beneath the window of our booth, sat an object.
Small. Metallic. Cylindrical, about the width of a pen and half the length. Its surface had a dull sheen that wasn’t steel or aluminum, a darker alloy I couldn’t identify, and a seam ran along its center where two halves connected.
No visible markings or obvious power source. But the ozone smell was coming from it, concentrated, and my wolf recoiled.
I crouched and reached for it.
The moment my fingers made contact, pain erupted through my hand. White-hot, instant, the specific burn of silver alloy pressed against lycan skin. I jerked my hand back. The pads of my fingers were red, already blistering.
Silver.The casing was silver.
My jaw clenched. The burn faded as my healing kicked in, the blisters smoothing over within seconds, but the implications landed with the force of a blow.
Whoever planted this knew what we were. Knew silver would hurt us. Had positioned a device, not a weapon but a monitoring tool, directly outside our location, tracking our movements.
The compound. The dart that hit Percival. The scent-masking technology we couldn’t trace in the forest. This was connected. All of it, threaded together into a pattern I couldn’t see the full shape of yet.
I pulled a handkerchief from my back pocket, wrapped the cylinder without touching its surface, and pocketed it. Lucian needed to see this. So did the contact in Veyndral who’d been analyzing the dart compound.
My eyes swept the alley one more time. The surveillance presence had faded. Whoever had been watching either retreated when I came outside or was skilled enough to mask their exit.
I memorized every detail of the scene. Then I turned and walked back to the diner’s front entrance.
Through the window, I spotted Mira in our booth.
She wasn’t alone.
Martinez stood at the edge of the table, one hip propped against the booth across from ours, arms crossed with his best casual lean. His turnout jacket was unzipped, suggesting he was on break from the firehouse.
My wolf surged against my ribs with a possessiveness that bordered on feral.
I pushed through the door. The bell chimed.
“... can’t believe you’re the bookshop girl.” Martinez was shaking his head, laughing, and the admiration in his voice made my teeth ache. “I mean, I knew you were pretty before, but you look completely different. In a good way. A really good way.”
“She looked fine before,” I said.
My voice cut through the diner’s ambient noise with the efficiency of a blade. Martinez’s head snapped toward me. His smile wavered when he registered my expression, which I was making no effort to soften.
“Hey, Solomon.” He straightened off the booth. Self-preservation instincts activating, finally. “I was just saying hi. I saw her sitting here and didn’t recognize her at first.”
“You’ve said hi.” I didn’t sit down. My height advantage placed Martinez firmly in my shadow, and I watched the calculation happen behind his eyes.
“Right.” Martinez’s hands came up, palms out. “Just being friendly. That’s all.”
“Martinez.”
He flinched. Not from volume, I hadn’t raised my voice, but from the tone. The one I’d perfected extracting cooperation from people who initially believed they had options.
